Searching for Shetland’s lost seagrass: integrating historic records, community participation, and drone imagery to map change in seagrass distribution

Description

To overcome challenges in monitoring marine habitats across remote, complex coastlines in the Shetland Islands, a mixed-methods approach was used to investigate change in seagrass habitats. The past extent of seagrass (or marlok or marlie in the Shetland language) was reconstructed by drawing on local knowledge, online data repositories, herbarium records, and historic accounts. These sources revealed a period of high-abundance prior to the 1920s before extensive loss of seagrass habitat. To assess the current habitat extent, small drones captured aerial images of marine habitat features, which were ground-truthed by local snorkelers and paddlers. The small, relatively inexpensive drones combined with local citizen-science efforts were a cost- and time-effective way to survey remote and hard to access areas with complex coastlines, enabled by locally based surveyors taking advantage of short weather windows. This project demonstrated the value of integrating diverse knowledge sources to enrich our study of changing biodiversity patterns.

Período	28 may 2026
Título del evento	UArctic Congress 2026
Tipo de evento	Conference